


My Shadow

by WeaverofDreams



Category: Fantasy - Fandom
Genre: Depression, Drug Abuse, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, Fantasy, Mental Health Issues, Recreational Drug Use, Self-Harm, Self-Medication
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-30
Updated: 2019-05-30
Packaged: 2020-03-29 13:45:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19021156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WeaverofDreams/pseuds/WeaverofDreams
Summary: John is living with his shadow constantly taunting him. He cannot tell if it is something just in his head, or if it is really happening. As it turns out, marijuana and heroin abuse are the only things that can silence this malevolent part of him. This, however, leads to more problems as his addiction worsens.





	My Shadow

The rain drums its fingers against the windows of my apartment. Sara sits across from me, her eyes silent and old as they observe me shooting up what will hopefully be my last dose of heroin. Apply pressure to the plunger with the ball of the thumb, down it goes, and- aaaah… When the warmth crawls up my arm, it kind of starts to dance and hop like when mom used to play ‘fingers’ with me. It was basically a game where she’d have me close my eyes and stick my arm out, and she’d have two of her fingers dance from my wrist towards the middle of my arm, and I’d squirm and laugh from how much it tickled, but the point was I’d have to guess when she hit the middle. The first time she did it, I said ‘Now!’ and opened my eyes to see her fingers stopped just on the brink of the bend, and she giggled. That’s about as detailed as my memory gets, besides the fact that some sunlight was striking her through the blinds with this broken golden glow.  
“It doesn’t do much for me anymore. Just makes it so I don’t feel sick,” I tell her.  
“I know,” she offers a quick purse of her lips in an apologetic gesture of half-pity and half-weariness. “This is the last time, okay? Once you start feeling better enough, we’re going.”  
“Oh I already feel a lot better,” I say. The sound of each drop of rain tapping at my shoulders and running down them, flowing into my core, which pulses warmth through every vein in my body. “You know, I wonder if it was around that time that Jack started talking to me.”  
“Who?”  
“Jack, my shadow. You know, I’ve told you before, right?”  
“Oh. I remember,” she sits back into her chair and grips the armrests in her hands so tight that I see her fingers go white at the joints. The warmth in my chest is already starting to fade, but at least I don’t feel the aches in my body anymore. “You’d mentioned him, but half the time I didn’t know what you were talking about. I just knew it wasn’t healthy for you to be making all that up. Or hallucinating it or whatever. You said he’s gone, right? And you know he’s not real?”  
“What? No, he’s real. You’d never seen him is the thing, or heard him. He’s gone because of the heroin, and that’s why I’m afraid-”  
“John,” she cuts me off, raising a hand to her face before massaging the corners of her eyes. “Can we stop pretending, please? You’ve always had a big imagination, I know, I remember. I remember the games we played and how you’d always come up with aliens that we had to fight or how a sorcerer took over our town- it’s just too much now. I have a job to do, you have to get on your feet, and the real world isn’t made of heroes and villains.”  
“I was worried you’d say that,” I say, starting to feel cold. I should have pushed her to let me have a higher dose. “It’s just that, it took me a long time to realize that people didn’t talk to their shadows and that maybe, just maybe, there really was something wrong with me. I just figured that nobody liked talking about it because it was embarrassing and if you brought it up, everyone would tell you ‘everyone has to deal with it, stupid’. What bothered me the most, I guess, is how well everyone else seemed to deal with it. Which is dumb, ‘cause how can you deal with it? Most of the time you’re thinking of ways to slice the shadow right off, and then when you realize that that’s just impossible, well, there’s only one other way out. Yeah. So I’d look up things like ‘ways to kill yourself’ and ‘how painless is jumping off a bridge?’ etcetera, etcetera. And…”  
I’m called out of a dream by her voice. “Wake up, John. Wake up!”  
“Oh! Sorry, that happens,” I say.  
“I know. But about what we were saying, you really believe that your shadow was talking to you? That Jack was real?”  
“Is real,” I nod. “Because I know he was, at least, ‘cause he practically tortured me day in and day out. Maybe you never saw him, but I did!” I feel myself getting heated, especially agitated by the low dose she’d made me have.  
“If that’s the case, then maybe you should get tested for schizophrenia or something,” she says through gritted teeth.  
Her words bite into me hard. A shiver crawls down my spine as a cold silence falls between us. She doesn’t care, she’s just like everyone else I’ve tried to tell. I knew that, so why’d I even agree to let her come over and push me into rehab? She just wants this to be wrapped up and done away with, just take care of the problem easy as anything. It’s strange, really. My childhood and young teens were full of women, which I think was a really good thing ‘cause I feel like women have a really unique view of life, just usually so much more compassionate. I never really felt at any disadvantage because of this. As a matter of fact, I’ve always felt grateful to father for leaving ‘cause he let me have Sara and Tara and mom to show me what empathy is. But it turned out that they weren’t always that way. Sometimes things weren’t easy to solve, and they turned their backs. Mom was the only one I could rely on. She dealt with all the shit all the time. I remember how she poured her life into keeping our aunt, her sister, alive. I didn’t know her that well, but mom was torn apart trying to get her all the treatment she could, but cancer is a terrible, horrible thing, and no amount of love and time can stop it.  
“Sorry…” she says while shaking her head. “I shouldn’t have said that. But, really, one thing at a time. Let’s get you to the hospital.”  
“Wait, wait,” my stomach turns and the world starts spinning as I try to get up from my seat. “I think I’m gonna throw up.”  
The next thing I know is I’m in the passenger seat next to Sara.  
“You know,” I found myself saying to her, “mom would never let me out at night, not even until I was about fifteen, when she sent me out for medicine when she was sick.”  
“She wasn’t that strict. We lived in a sketchy area.”  
“Why do you say that?” I remember stepping out into the cold, misty night, and the streetlights hung heavily over their reflections in the wet street. That was burned into my memory, more or less. I ran down to the gas station on Fleet Street and picked up some Pepto Bismol, and the whole time I went, Jack was screaming at me that I should stay out there, and just stay away from home. I was too much of a burden to mom, and it’d be better for me to just lie down in a gutter and hope that nobody would find me. Not gonna lie, I was fairly sure that I’d do that on my way back to the house, but the bridge that crosses over the path I take through the woods to get to the gas station turned out to be occupied. Some kids from school were standing around, passing some joints and laughing. I knew the smell of weed ‘cause kids would smoke it in the bathroom at school. One of them was in my gym class, a girl named Mandy, and she called me over. I didn’t really know what to do, but she actually remembered my name, so, against Jack’s demands and pulling at my feet away from the lamp over the path, I kind of strode up to them and said, “Hey.”  
I figured that I’d been outside at night for the first time, why not take more steps to be brave? Do something different, you know. So, of course, after Mandy’s turn, she passes the joint over to me and I kind of look at it like it’s some kind of animal that’s about to pounce me.  
I’d been wary of marijuana, afraid of what it could do to me. But Mandy was smiling, and the others were laughing and joking around, generally having a good time. So I took it and put the thing up to my lips and sucked in the air through it, and the taste of fire hit my tongue for the first time. I can’t tell you what it tasted like, ‘cause I started coughing as soon as it hit my lungs.  
They all started laughing at me, and Mandy patted me on the back and said, “Don’t worry ‘bout it, gets easier with time” and she smiled really sweetly. And- I swear to god, everything just started warping around me. Things just changed and got funnier and I started getting really self-conscious. But something even weirder happened. I didn’t hear Jack anymore. I looked to see if he was there, and he wasn’t. He was gone, the weed cut him right off. I felt like a reverse Peter Pan and I’d finally gotten rid of the damn thing. For the first time ever, conversation just flowed- with me as a part of it! We passed it around, and I hardly remember what it was about, but I felt like I was passing a ball around like in a basketball game. There was a lot of laughing… And when I went home, Mom wondered where I’d been.  
“Wake up, come on snap out of it! Wake up!”  
“What? Huh?”  
“You keep worrying me!” Sara exclaimed, her expression one of pain.  
“Sorry, sorry. I can’t control it. I nod off, okay?” I threw my hands up to show that the problem was too big for them to grasp.  
The memory I was thinking about reminded me of something, though. After a few moments of silence, I decide to lighten the mood.  
“Hey, do you remember the Weed Wackers?”  
“Yes. I remember a lot of our high school years, John.”  
“Come on,” I nudge her arm, trying to get a smile out of her. “You remember those times, right?”  
“If you mean how you’d drag me over to Mandy’s or someone else’s place occasionally just to sit around and smoke for hours on end then yes, I do. You know, it’s that same group of bums that got you where you are now, don’t you think?”  
I take in a deep sigh and watch the rain splash against the windshield. What does she mean, where I am now?  
“Maybe I’m not in such a bad place,” I say quietly.  
“Oh no no no no no no no,” she says intensely. “Listen to me right now. You are my brother and I love you but you are not in a good place. You are living in a dump and you’re addicted to heroin and you don’t have a job.”  
I think the rain’s started to fall harder than before. It seems to slam against the hood and the windshield with sickening thwacks. The car is also super cold so I hug myself for warmth and start playing with the sting of my hoodie.  
Weed Wackers. That was just a name we gave ourselves in homage to the bud from which our group bloomed. Jack was still around pretty often, but when I smoked with the WWs, he was nowhere to be seen. We’d go to Juliette’s house the most, ‘cause her parents were ‘ex-hippies’, supposedly, and they were actually the ones we got most of our weed from. Those were fun times, I regret not doing more with myself then, but other than that, I feel like I was just figuring myself out and what I wanted to do with my life. Mom wasn’t happy with it, of course. She knew when I came home stoned.  
Of course, she wouldn’t have any of it. “Did you go out and smoke with your friends again?” and she’d nod her head in affirmative anger. She wouldn’t wait for my reply. “I can smell it on you! Do you think I’m stupid? I went to college! I saw-” she hesitated there and seemed to build up the right amount of hatred to spew with the words “those hippies just sitting around and smoking that shit!”  
That particular time I just went straight to my room and started listening to some music, but she followed me up there and was in an absolute rage. I feel like I would have been terrified if I hadn’t been stoned, I’d never seen her so mad. But I just sat there and listened to her until she was tired of yelling and left.  
I just kind of stared at my desk at a bunch of my random shit, you know, pens, pencils, notebooks, textbooks, and a pair of scissors. Weirdly enough, it was the scissors that I couldn’t look away from, it felt like they were already snipping something. It was a really bizarre experience ‘cause I crept up to them on my hands and knees, the carpet’s flames licking at my legs, and grabbed them. Something was possessing me, bringing those scissors up to my hair and cutting it off- now, I had kind of short hair back then in that goofy nineties bangs style, but that didn’t stop me from cutting it even shorter. It was then that I realized that Jack was there, silently dancing on my desktop. He also held a pair of scissors in one hand, joyfully hacking at his hair with them.  
The Weed Wackers thought my new “buzzcut” was pretty cool, but I noticed the way the other kids would look at me when I walked through the hallways. There was a fear often mixed with something else like pity or concern or even hatred in their eyes. One of my teachers, Mrs. Salisbury, she was a cool person. Fairly. I really admired her. She pulled me aside the day I came in with that cut and she sat me down for a bit in her room, and even though I told her that I had to go to my next class she was like, “Stay here and chill for a bit.”  
When I told her that I’d miss stuff and my teachers would deduct points, she said, “Don’t worry about it, I’ll write a note.”  
It was really a relief for her to do that. School was getting really stressful, and I mean really stressful, not just ‘cause of the awkward social things, but I was in a few G/T classes that were really kicking my ass. I was still stressed just sitting there, of course, with my mind on nothing but all the work I had to do that night just to keep up with everyone else. Jack was also pretty loud when things were silent.  
“How’ve you been?” she asked.  
“Not bad, how about yourself?”  
“I’ve been good, but I kept you here because I’m worried about you. Your hair, your grades, you’re giving me some really concerning signs.” That was one of the things I liked about her, she didn’t beat around the bush, she always got right to it.  
“What d’you want me to tell you?” I asked. It just seemed oddly personal that she’d ask me what’s going on in my life.  
“Whatever you want to tell,” she said.  
“Well, classes have been stressful,” I shrugged.  
“Nothing going on at home? People picking on you here at school?”  
“No, not really…” which wasn’t a lie, unless you count your shadow that no one else can see or hear as being someone from school.  
We spent the rest of that period just sitting, me twiddling my thumbs and her typing stuff on her computer.  
I don’t know what it was, maybe the fact that someone was actually showing some care for me, but Jack stopped talking for a while. He’d somewhat disappeared from my life, and for a time I started to question my memory of him, that maybe I had imagined it all. Because of that, I could actually focus a bit more on school work and I went from getting C’s and D’s to mostly B’s and even an A here and there. Even when I wasn’t high, Jack was just a simple shadow on the ground, so the Weed Wackers stopped smoking for a while. In fact, we started a band somewhat- me on drums.  
“You know how I used to whack the shit out of those drums though, right?”  
“Yeah, I do remember that,” Sara says, her voice softer than before. “Hey, that’s something you could work towards. Getting back on your feet enough to play drums again.  
“I was a beast at those things.”  
I sit and reminisce about the shows we played at bars here and there. We were really, really shitty, but it was fun. It was always funny when people would offer us a beer after them ‘cause the people running the place didn’t seem to mind seeing minors getting drunk. At that point, I’d just go spend the night in Mandy’s trailer. Her parents weren’t really present, so we kind of made a place for ourselves, just us cooking and cleaning and hoping the next show would provide enough for groceries.  
“I had to move in with Mandy.”  
“You know, that really hurt mom.”  
“Fucking bull - shit! She hated having me at home. You know it, too.”  
“Maybe it’s ‘cause you were never helping around the house? Need I remind you that I did your chores for you half the time. Not to mention how many times you would scream at her.”  
“I never started those arguments! She was always accusing me of something I didn’t do.”  
“‘Cause you never did anything.”  
“Wow, okay.”  
“Hey! Stay with me! Come on!”  
“Ah! Fuck, it keeps happening. I’m so sorry, I don’t get why it’s having me nod out so much today. And it’s the same dream each time, too.”  
“What is it?”  
“Basically Jack grows super big and starts growing a bunch of arms and wraps himself around me, suffocating me. It’s terrifying.”  
“That is scary.”  
“That reminds me of when I was younger and started trying to escape him for the first time. I tried so many things, Sara. But one of the most terrifying was when I went into the closet in mom and dad’s room, the main one with their fancy clothes and such. When I turned out the light, I thought that Jack would disappear and dissolve into the blackness, but instead he was suddenly all around me. He was laughing and suffocating me from all sides, and he gave me these horrifying images of endless ghosts and demons. I couldn’t tell if they were apparitions that he was making me see or if they were versions of himself, these angry, violent creatures.”  
“You’d been sleeping in a pitch black room your whole childhood.”  
“Honestly, no, not once Jack showed up ‘cause he was afraid of disappearing, even though it turns out full darkness makes him stronger, but I guess he didn’t really know that. He’d tell me to keep a nightlight on. I kept it plugged into a socket at the end of my bed so he could spread out against the wall. He’d be above me in his own vertical bed, staring down so I couldn’t sleep. It was just too creepy having him hang over me like that, not to mention the awful things he’d say.”  
“You still haven’t told me what he’d say.”  
“Oh, I dunno, I don’t really wanna talk about it.”  
"Come on, John, I’m here for you. Talk to me.”  
“He’d just say things- you really don’t need to worry about it. He’s gone now.”  
“Hm.”  
The problem is, I don’t know how true that is. He might be gone, but I can’t say for sure. I’d started getting stomach pains after a while. Mandy and I couldn’t support ourselves off the band, and after everyone in our class graduated high school, it was clear that we were never going to graduate ourselves. We’d chosen our path and it took us to a dark place full of shadows. Jack came back then. He followed me wherever I went, so most of the time, I just stayed in the trailer where I’d be able to lay down in bed and take his beating without needing to exhaust myself further elsewhere. Mandy wouldn’t have it. If I couldn’t help pay the rent, then why should I be allowed to stay there? She kicked me out.  
The stomach pains from starvation and anxiety were starting to consume me. Jack’s darkness was enveloping me. I hardly knew where to turn or what to do, so Jack guided me back to Juliette’s house, where hopefully I could get something to ease my trouble. It turned out that she’d gotten into heroin for stomach pains, so I started seeing her dealer. I remember wondering what the hell I was thinking when I put the flame under the spoon for the first time. But Juliette insisted that it was cheaper than anything Big Pharma could offer. It was cheap and accessible, she’d said, and it’d keep me feeling better for a while. So I filled the syringe and made the first hole in my arm. My perfect, pristine arm, with nothing but space that would be filled with scars as the years went by. I was able to get a job as a janitor for a bit because of how I managed my time between highs, and the lows weren’t so bad then. So I got myself the place I have now, but once the pains came back, and heroin only manages to keep them away for an hour or so, I lost the job and I’ve been running myself deeper in debt paying for scraps of food and heroin.  
Maybe Jack isn’t gone, necessarily. I still hear him, distantly, but the drugs keep me a blissful distance from his words. From where I stand, they sound like whispers of an indecipherable language, so I’m better now than I’ve ever been.  
“We’re here,” Sara says as we pull up to the hospital.  
Yes, I’m the best I’ve ever been emotionally.  
“And you know what?” I find myself saying to the doctor. We’d gone through the whole waiting room process and been taken into the patient room, and the doctor’s just asked me to talk about everything.  
“Maybe everyone’s right, and Jack isn’t real. If that’s the case, then all I have to do is ignore him, and he’ll go away, right? He’s not real and he can’t hurt me.”


End file.
